My book, Rock and Roll with Ember.js, is now live!

18 February 2015

I started writing my book, Rock & Roll with Ember.js, on July 18, 2014, exactly
7 months ago (More precisely, I prepared some drafts from early chapters most of
which I ended up rewriting before that, but who doesn’t like a good story?).

Tame the dreaded Ember.js learning curve

Ember is said to be hard to learn. Developers who are new to the framework hit
a wall and can’t easily find out how all the pieces fit together.

My own experience tells me that Ember has a small number of core concepts that
you have to grok to be able to tame the learning curve. Once you understand
these key ideas behind the framework’s design, you will fly over that wall and
see the green meadow filled with flowers and bunnies.

You will build Ember applications with confidence and - if you are like me -
you will love building them.

Read it and build it!

My book also has a concept, and a very pragmatic one at that.

In the book, we are building an application, chapter by chapter. As we
progress, we are adding new features to the application, introducing new
Ember concepts that are needed for implementing the feature.

When a list of bands need to be displayed alongside with the songs of the
selected band, we reach for nested routes. When we need a widget that displays
stars for the songs, we introduce components. When we want to show the user
that loading data from the backend is in progress, we learn about loading
routes.

Set List

The book currently has the following chapters:

Introduction to Ember.js

Ember CLI

Templates and data bindings

Routing

Nested routes

Actions

Components

Controllers

Advanced routing

Talking to a backend - with Ember Data

Testing

Sorting and searching with query params

Loading and error routes

Helpers

Getting ready for Ember 2.0

I say ‘currently’ because I will definitely have to change some chapters as
Ember evolves (To give an example, Controllers will probably become Routable components).

A reference book and a reference application

Ember moves rapidly towards version 2.0. As each minor version is released, it
brings new syntaxes and deprecates old ones. Even though the Ember Core team
takes extreme care to ensure a smooth upgrade process, it is easy for an
application to lag behind, having a few deprecations here and there and not
using the shiny new tools.

The motto of the Ember 2.0 roadmap is “Stability without Stagnation”, that old
syntaxes and practices should vanish gradually, giving ample time for developers
to update their applications. At the same time, Ember should not stagnate, it
should introduce new features.

I adhere to this motto, but, more importantly, my book does, too.

I want the book and the Rock & Roll application to be up-to-date with the latest
stable Ember version and not have any of the deprecations. What that means in
practice is that if you buy one of the packages, you will most likely get book
updates after each 1.x release. And at no extra cost to you until 2.0 ships!

The “New Beginning” tour

Wait, there is more! To celebrate that the book has finally seen the
light of day, there is a 25% discount on all packages.

This offer expires on Sunday, February 22, at 23:59 PST, so grab yours now!

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all of you who have pushed me through the finish line, either
by praising my screencasts, blog posts and review copies of my book, retweeting
my marketing tweets, giving valuable feedback that made the book better or
simply by pointing out typos in the text.

I would also like to thank you to the Ember Core team whose relentless work
makes Ember better every day. You are putting so much time in, it’s almost
insane. It’s kinda obvious but without your contributions, this book would not
exist.